Coloring With Teal: Jacksonville Jaguars Free Agency Stuck on Spin Cycle

The Jacksonville Jaguars’ extravagant spending the past two seasons gave limited reward in the win column. Will this season’s FA class make the difference? Can they?

The 2017 NFL League year has begun, kicked off with the annual scrum known as the NFL Free Agency Period. Today, Coloring With Teal is going to take a look at the relevance of building the team through Free Agency.

We did it! The Jacksonville Jaguars spent loads on the 2017 Free Agency!

By now, you will likely have read a multitude of articles regarding the Jacksonville Jaguars’ activity during the first ’round’ of free agency. This is the time frame, of course, where the top tier of free agents are wooed by many teams (unless you have a history of questionable protest choices or are a running back) and then signed to huge contracts just as the clock strikes 4:00 pm on March 9.

For the Jaguars, these acquisitions focused heavily on the defense. For a team which has seen woes on offense in 2016 and sported a sixth-ranked defense, the Jaguars did not leave well enough alone. Sweeping away the last vestiges of the 2013 draft, they brought in cornerbacks, defensive backs, and safeties.

Unfortunately, winning paper football is only fun when playing it during study hall or on long bus rides during field trips.

And the pundits hail these moves as savvy improvements by the Jaguars.

I’d like to take a moment and go conversational with you, if you’ll permit. As you may have noticed, Coloring With Teal isn’t a “breaking news” column. I’ll admit, during the first days of free agency, I would pop in to check out the latest news on Black and Teal. For a moment, I’d imagine a new CWT article emblazoned with a BREAKING NEWS tag, only to remember that that’s not my style. I enjoy letting the chips fall where they may, watch the situation unfold, and then see what it all means.

Sure, in previous CWTs, the perspective I’ve brought of the Jaguars’ controversial moves have perhaps come across as a sort of “sunshine and rainbows” point of view. Ultimately, I try to find the center line, since most of the time things are neither as disastrously dire nor as wonderfully euphoric as we fans make them out to be.

To that end, let’s see if the Jags free agency this year might indeed yield better dividends than they have in previous years.

One of the better-known proverbs in professional football is that building a team through free agency does not yield permanent or long term success (see here, or here). Despite this adage, over the past few seasons the Jaguars have ranked in the upper third of teams who “won” in free agency (2015, 2016, 2017).

Indeed, over at Bleacher Report, Gary Davenport wrote about the Jaguars’ day one in this year’s free agency:

"The additions of Campbell, Bouye and safety Barry Church (who landed a four-year deal, per Rapoport) make the Jaguars look formidable defensively on paper."

Unfortunately, winning paper football is only fun when playing it during study hall or on long bus rides during field trips.

So if general manager David Caldwell knows that this is not how to build a long-term winner, and Super Bowl-winner executive vice president Tom Coughlin knows it, why are they doing it? Wouldn’t they already know that true success is built through the draft?

Take the New England Patriots for example. The “Great and Powerful Hoodie,” Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, doesn’t build his team through free agency.

Or does he?

Although the Pats are widely known for getting rid of players before they become too expensive or their talent declines, the team still signs big names as well as the rank-and-file players. Let’s travel back to 2001, where the Patriots were coming off a 5-11 season, Tom Brady was still a backup quarterback, and Belichick was still a sub-.500 head coach. In retrospect, as Mike Reiss writes at ESPN,

"A remarkable haul that included cornerback Terrell Buckley, guard Mike Compton, linebacker Bryan Cox, fullback Marc Edwards, quarterback Damon Huard, linebacker Larry Izzo, receiver David Patten, linebacker Roman Phifer, defensive end Anthony Pleasant, running back Antowain Smith, and linebacker Mike Vrabel. It’s hard to imagine there will ever be another free-agent class in New England that has the impact of ’01."

Now, don’t get the idea that I am so pie-in-the-sky as to think that Bortles will come back in 2017 and play at a Super Bowl MVP caliber level. I do think he’ll be much improved over 2016, am trying to have realistic expectations.

Nor do I think that Jaguars head coach Doug Marrone is Belichick’s long-lost doppelganger who will make the same decisions as the Pats. And despite Coughlin’s Savior-of-the-Franchise aura, it remains to be seen how much his style will permeate this team and lead to an improved win-loss record without stepping on Marrone’s toes.

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All I am trying to point out is that teams build through both the draft and free agency until they don’t have to rely so heavily on free agency. The Patriots still boast free agency classes whose sizes are comparable to other teams, but having drafted well and establishing a winning culture quickly made it easier to take a more leisurely, selective approach to free agency.

This is what the Jacksonville Jaguars are trying to accomplish. Now that we know what they’ve done in 2017 free agency, we have to wait until the end of April to see how they plan to continue to build the team through the draft. We already know that they are working hard to establish the winning culture.

After all, the Jags want to win more than just paper football.

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